So Adobe has announced Cre­ative Suite 5. There have already been some amaz­ing pre­view video’s, but, as always with Adobe prod­ucts, there will be the debate whether to upgrade or not. I am lucky enough to have Adobe Mas­ter Col­lec­tion CS4, but here are the top three fea­tures which will prob­a­bly push me down the upgrade path…

Con­tent Aware Fill in Pho­to­shop CS5

Ok, I’ll admit it, I am ter­ri­ble at retouch­ing photo’s, and I would imag­ine that I am not alone. Good behind the cam­era, but don’t have the time to mas­ter this exact­ing skill. For us, Adobe has intro­duced Con­tent Aware Fill.  I could explain it, but it’s sim­pler to see it in action:

Native Sup­port For Canon 5D MkII / 7D Movies In Pre­miere Pro

Let me tell you, edit­ing video from a Canon DSLR in Pre­miere CS4 is not easy by any stretch of the imag­i­na­tion. The main issue being Canon’s file for­mat choice for DSLR video, good for size and play­back, bad for edit­ing on a Non Lin­ear Edi­tor (i.e. Pre­miere Pro, Final Cut Pro, Sony Vegas, Avid, etc.). Because of the type of com­pres­sion used, Premiere Pro has to work hard to extrap­o­late image data when you try and “scrub” through your clips. The nor­mal res­o­lu­tion is to trans-code the files to another for­mat, usu­ally at addi­tional cost for addi­tional codecs (Neoscene, I am point­ing at you!).  Com­bined with a new, GPU accel­er­ated, play­back engine called Mer­cury, native sup­port for Canon for­mats should make the whole edit­ing process a lot less labor intensive:

Abil­ity To Cre­ate / Edit Word­Press Sites in Dreamweaver

As I am the jack of all trades (and more than likely mas­ter of none) when it comes to the design and main­te­nance of this web­site, I am espe­cially look­ing for­ward to the abil­ity to cre­ate, edit, and main­tain Word­Press sites within Dreamweaver CS5. Up to now, I have been reluc­tant to dive in and learn pro­fi­ciently the HTML, CSS, PHP, and JavaScript nec­es­sary to per­form this task, but this fea­ture should allow me a greater under­stand­ing of how a typ­i­cal Word­Press tem­plate hangs together.

Bonus Fea­tures

Some of the other Cre­ative Suite 5 fea­tures which caught my eye:

• Lens cor­rec­tion in Pho­to­shop CS5 (as against PTlens)
• HDR Pro in Pho­to­shop CS5 (as against Pho­tomatix Pro)
• 64Bit across all appli­ca­tions